RUTHFULLY YOURS

To the Left the highest form of service to America is to betray it.

This is why President Obama yesterday ordered that the 35-year sentence of convicted traitor U.S. Army Pvt. Chelsea Manning be commuted. Manning, who leaked vast quantities of classified materials, was born male with the given name Bradley but now identifies as female.

Bradley’s transgender status, which has made the prisoner a cause célèbre among left-wingers, almost certainly played a huge role in the commutation. Manning, who has tried to commit suicide in prison, has not had sex-reassignment surgery but has been campaigning for it for years.

As a consequence of our Marxist, identity politics-obsessed president’s order, Manning is now scheduled to be released from military prison on May 17 of this year, instead of 2045. This means that upon release Manning will have served about seven years behind bars.

Manning was convicted by court-martial on July 30, 2013, of 20 counts, including six violations of the Espionage Act, along with theft and computer fraud. An acquittal was registered on the most serious charge, aiding the enemy, which can result in a sentence of life imprisonment.

As a clemency-sweetener, on Jan. 12 WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange offered to allow himself to be extradited to the U.S. if President Obama ordered the release of Manning.

Will Assange honor his promise? We’ll see.

White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest’s comments last Friday may have foreshadowed the Manning clemency.

Responding to a reporter’s question, Earnest said there was a “pretty stark difference” between Manning’s case and document leaker Edward Snowden’s.

“Chelsea Manning is somebody who went through the military criminal justice process, was exposed to due process, was found guilty, was sentenced for her crimes, and she acknowledged wrongdoing,” Earnest said.

“Mr. Snowden fled into the arms of an adversary and has sought refuse in a country that most recently made a concerted effort to undermine confidence in our democracy.”

Earnest added that the documents Manning is said to have provided to WikiLeaks were “damaging to national security,” but those disclosed by Snowden were “far more damaging to national security.”

Manning’s actions constituted the largest intelligence leak in U.S. history.

It is naïve to think that political correctness is simply a matter of being scolded for saying something unacceptable to liberals. It has become much more than that. Political correctness is a deliberate tool used by the Left to intimidate conservatives and people of faith into silence, with the goal of making our classic and time-tested opinions illegitimate.

Political Correctness is a strategy, a weapon of social warfare, a bullying against those unwilling to reshape and renounce their traditional belief system and bow to the dictates of the leftocracy dead-set on total domination of our lives and culture. It enforces censorship and activates demonization, threatening those unwilling to submit and apologize with loss of job, livelihood, social acceptability, company sales, friends, reputation, and status. It is the liberal version of Islamic blasphemy laws, ruthlessly excising anyone who questions or strays from the leftwing cultural and social dogmas. It is the most un-American development in our lifetime.

In many ways it is worse than the McCarthyism practiced in the early 50s. Senator Joseph McCarthy, who sat on the Senate Committee of Government Operations, targeted relatively few, whereas liberal political correctness is targeting over 60%, tens of millions, of Americans. And whereas McCarthy was generally correct regarding the communist leanings and activities of his targets, liberal political-correctness czars are off-the-wall incorrect when accusing regular and patriotic Americans of racism, misogyny, xenophobia, or whatever is the latest “ism”. Joe McCarthy’s hearings lasted a mere couple of years, while the scourge and punishment of political correctness is into its 20th year.

Today’s New McCarthyites exist and labor on the Left and are engaged in the thoroughly un-American activity of censoring speech, curtailing and ostracizing religious freedom, and doing whatever they can to deconstruct traditional family life and taint the values of our parents, our Founders, and our grandparents as evil. By deriding everything we hold dear as unacceptable, and making us pay the price of holding onto our cherished beliefs, they hope to transform America, and American family and religious life, into a Sweden/Brussels fantasy or a completely secular and unwholesome political entity. They wish to replace America while we stand by and watch it happen.

But, the good news is that we are not helpless

The nation is now hopelessly divided and will remain so. Unless Trump recognizes this unpalatable reality, much of his decision-making and hard work will go for nought.

Donald Trump has gone on record as wishing to unite the nation. In fact, he has declared it one of his urgent priorities in numerous post-election comments. I hope this is mere presidential rhetoric, for America has long passed the point when unity would be possible. The nation is now hopelessly divided and will remain so. Unless Trump recognizes this unpalatable reality, much of his decision-making and hard work will go for nought.

The left, which includes the majority of national institutions — the legacy media, the academy, television, Hollywood, the social media providers, the judiciary, online and print groups, government departments, the Democratic Party and much of the Republican Party, the political class as a whole and the army of liberal voters — will never be pacified. The left will never cease in its efforts to scheme against a Trump — or any conservative-leaning — administration.

Trump must take seriously Newt Gingrich’s warning against the temptation to “give in” to the left when opposition starts to mount from every quarter — the Greens, government employees, the teachers’ unions, indeed the entire progressivist Category 5 hurricane of demands and vilification. Not only should Trump resist that temptation, he must not waste his time and energy seeking to heal what cannot be repaired, but needs to engage in a kind of domestic cold war, using every legislative means in his purview to contain a dangerous and implacable internal enemy. This is realpolitik applied locally.

Robert Oscar Lopez pillories the academic left and the education industry at all levels, he writes: “Try to build bridges to them, and they punish you for it…[they take] kind gestures from conservatives as a sign that conservatives are weak.” The arts of conciliation tend to be perceived as “an invitation to shame you publicly, using anything you say against you.” He continues: “Higher education is not a swamp to be drained. It is a diabolical machine, and it is time to pull the plug.” What he says of the education consortium is true of the left across the entire cultural, social and political spectrum.

It is naïve to assume that the political fissure between left and right, collectivism and individuality, Socialism and classical liberalism, fantasy and reality, can ever be bridged. In essence, this is a perennial conflict, one which the great satirist Jonathan Swift in The Battle of the Books, drawing from the classics, described as the enmity between the predatory spider, who purls illusions out of his own entrails, and the foraging bee who produces sweetness and light and convulses the spider’s self-spun “citadel.” It is a conflict between opposed epistemological frames of reference — in Swiftian terms, that of the fanatic parvenu and that of the companionable humanist. Today it is a war between progressivists and conservatives, between utopian experimentalism and traditional values. The rupture cannot be parged. One should not invest in a fruitless and destructive effort to create unity where none is possible.

Where the effort to achieve unity has real meaning is in the attempt to mend the surmountable divisions of opinion within the conservative family in order to form a strong front against the forces that would subvert the political coherence and even the survival of the nation. Unity only makes sense if it is accomplished within the often disparate group of genuine patriots who may disagree on many points, yet who are basically at one in struggling to establish the rule of law and a functioning democratic — or rather, republican — polity. But to work for the unification of oil and water is not only an egregious error but a recipe for social and political disunity.

E.M. Cadwaladr argues America now comprises “two separate peoples…where any notion of compromise…is painfully naïve and utterly futile.” Conservatism is about the “freedom from government interference,” the freedom for citizens “to do with their property as they see fit [and to] prosper or fail in accordance with [their own] choices and abilities.” Conservatives believe that “charity is an individual virtue, [the purpose of which] is to raise the unfortunate to a state of self-sufficiency.” Freedom includes the right “to make one’s own judgments about other people” (so much for political correctness). And “equality” means equality before the law.

If Donald Trump had been referring to Rep. John Lewis’s civil-rights record when he wrote on Twitter Saturday that the congressman was “all talk” and “no action,” the president-elect might need a refresher course in U.S. history. One of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s closest allies, Mr. Lewis was on the front lines of the successful fight to end Jim Crow.

But for anyone who bothers to check out the full tweet, it’s clear that Mr. Trump was referring to Mr. Lewis’s record as a lawmaker. “Congressman John Lewis,” wrote Mr. Trump after the lawmaker questioned the legitimacy of the election, “should spend more time on fixing and helping his district, which is in horrible shape and falling apart (not to mention crime infested) rather than falsely complaining about the election results. All talk, talk, talk—no action or results. Sad!”
Mr. Lewis, a liberal Democrat from Georgia, was first elected to Congress in 1986, and he has spent much of the past three decades reminding people what he did before he got there. “Lewis has worked to commemorate the civil rights revolution in which he played such a large part,” explains the Almanac of American Politics. “He got a federal building in Atlanta named for King and won historic trail designation for the demonstrators’ route [for the 1965 march] from Selma to Montgomery [Ala.]. . . . Since 1998, he has led members of Congress on pilgrimages to civil rights sites.
All of which should further secure John Lewis’s rightful place in U.S. history. But to Mr. Trump’s point, what do Mr. Lewis’s mostly black constituents in Atlanta have to show for his time in Washington representing them? Atlanta has one of the widest gaps in the country between high- and low-income households, according to the Brookings Institution. A 2015 report by the Annie E. Casey Foundation found that although Atlanta “is considered an economic powerhouse and ‘black mecca,’ its wealth and promise don’t extend to many of its residents, particularly those of color, who struggle to make ends meet, get family-supporting jobs and access quality education.” The study found that incomes for Atlanta’s white residents were more than triple those of blacks; the high school graduation rate was 57% for blacks and 84% for whites; and black unemployment in Atlanta was 22%, versus a city average of 13% and a white rate of 6%.

Atlanta also hasn’t avoided the surge in violent crime that has hit other major cities in recent years. Last summer the mayor announced the creation of a task force to reduce gun violence, and in November the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that the city had been named “one of America’s top 25 murder capitals, according to the latest data from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report.”

Mr. Lewis’s poor record is not unique among black politicians with large black constituencies. Atlanta has had black Democratic mayors pushing liberal policies for decades, and blacks have been well-represented as city councilmen and in the top echelons of the police department and school system. Much the same is true of other major cities with large black populations—Baltimore, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Washington—which are lagging economically, notwithstanding black political clout from Congress down to the local school board. This is what Republicans mean when they say black voters have been getting little in return for their steadfast loyalty to Democrats. CONTINUE AT SITE

President Obama’s decision Tuesday to commute the 35-year prison sentence of Pfc. Chelsea, née Bradley,Manning will be celebrated on the left as a vindication of a well-intentioned whistleblower whose imprisonment at Ft. Leavenworth as a transgender woman was a travesty of justice. The real travesty is the show of leniency for a progressive cause célèbre whose actions put hundreds of lives at risk.

For those who need reminding, Manning was stationed in Iraq as a low-level intelligence analyst when he gained access to troves of classified material. Starting in 2010 he leaked nearly 750,000 documents to Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks. Included in the material were thousands of secret State Department cables and masses of military information on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Assange worked with reporters from several news organizations to publish the material, to much self-congratulation about the virtues of transparency.

U.S. diplomats and military officers took a less charitable view, with good reason. While many of the State Department cables contained little more than diplomatic party gossip, others disclosed sensitive conversations between U.S. diplomats and opposition leaders in repressive regimes. After the disclosure, Zimbabwe’s Morgan Tsvangirai was investigated by the regime of Robert Mugabe for “treasonous collusion between local Zimbabweans and the aggressive international world,” as the country’s attorney general put it.

Even more dangerous were leaks of operational secrets, including the names of Afghan informants working with U.S. coalition forces against the Taliban. A Navy SEAL who participated in the 2011 raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan testified that Manning’s leaks were found on the terrorist’s computer.

Little wonder that at the time Mr. Obama criticized “the deplorable action by WikiLeaks.” Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned that the document dump “puts people’s lives in danger” and was “an attack on America’s foreign policy,” its partnerships and alliances. Prosecutors initially sought a life sentence against Manning, who was eventually convicted of 17 of 22 charges, including espionage and theft.

Within 24 hours of sentencing in 2013, Manning said he wanted to begin hormone therapy and be known as Chelsea. Last year the Army agreed to finance her medical treatment for gender dysphoria. In December the ACLU and numerous LGBT groups wrote to Mr. Obama urging that he grant clemency to Manning, in part on grounds that she has been held in solitary confinement after suicide attempts.

The commutation sends a dreadful message to others in the military who might have grievances or other problems but haven’t stolen national secrets. The lesson is that if you can claim gender dysphoria or some other politically correct condition, you can betray your country and get off lightly.

On Tuesday Mr. Obama also commuted the sentence of Puerto Rican terrorist Oscar López Rivera, who was convicted of “seditious conspiracy” against the U.S. government. He belonged to the FALN, which was responsible for more than 70 bombings in the U.S. between 1974 and 1983, killing five and injuring dozens. Rivera, who has been in prison since 1981, had become the political project of “Hamilton” creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, who is a pal of President Obama. No word from the White House on whether the President alerted the families of the FALN’s victims.